As a parent of young children, I have recently come to know that lots of people find it acceptable to lie ("not telling the absolute truth") to children about all kinds of subjects. It is not only that they don't tell them there is no Santa Claus, they actually tell them that Santa Claus exists when children believe it's only a story, and they tell them that it is Santa Claus who gives them presents in Christmas. People tell 5 year old children that "if Mom and Dad really want it, a baby will appear inside Mom's belly". I once heard a Kindergarten "teacher" (can't find the right English word) telling a 3 year old that the broken tail of a plastic cow would grow again. I wonder if all this lying is acceptable? Perhaps there are some empirical, non philosophical issues here (how do children react to coming to know the truth about these things, and to coming to know that adults lied to them?; will this predispose children to lie when they grow?), but even if there are no bad distant consequences to this kind...

This is a great question, and it's one I think that parents -- and philosophers -- should think more about. I personally have grappled with it many times as a parent. It hit home for me when I was trying to figure out how to deal with my son's nightmares. The standard advice that turned up on web searches was to buy some kind of air freshening spray and tell your child that it was 'Bad Dream Spray' -- that we could spray it each night before bed and it would keep the nightmares away. In other words, the standard advice involved outright lying to kids. And this bugged me. And then I started thinking about all the other ways that we standardly lie to kids -- some of which you detail in your question. In general we think that lying is wrong. So why do we treat lying to kids differently, especially as we're simultaneously trying to teach them the value of honesty? One account for why we might think it's OK to lie to children comes from philosopher Sissela Bok, who notes that the special needs of...

Is it always worse to be unfaithful by action (having an affair) or by thought (fantasising about a person)? An affair can last for a while without the adulterer's partner ever even knowing about it and when it's over the adulterer may, in some cases, have a more favourable regard for his/her spouse. However fantasising about a person can go on indefinitely and the spouse is then always compared unfavourably with the love object - and the person fantasising is perpetuating an "in love" state which will keep him/her somewhat detached from reality. What are your views?

Following up on what Prof. Solomon says, you might want some way to assess each case on its merits. So you might think about what makes an affair wrong. Is it the betrayal of the spouse, or the effects that the affair has on the spouse? Some people might think: if my spouse had an affair, then even if I didn't know about it, and even if it made him behave nicer to me in the long run (perhaps because he came to appreciate me more), it would still be wrong because he would have betrayed me. On this view, the betrayal is bad independent of any effects it has. But some people locate the very badness of the betrayal in its effects: my spouse treats me poorly, spends our money indiscriminately, etc.; maybe other people, treat me differently as a result of the affair (they might look down on me and think I'm a fool, etc. etc.) And of course, maybe the affair leads to a breakdown of the marriage, which has all sorts of devastating consequences... Now, regardless of whether you think that the affair...

If we assume that there is no afterlife, what reason do we have to comply with a person's wishes as regards treatment of their corpse? In particular, it is striking to me that we should respect a person's wish not to extract their organs after death; what reason could we possibly have to heed the wishes of someone who no longer exists, especially when the donation of their organs could literally save the lives of several people?

Let me try to tackle a different aspect of your question: Why should we respect the wishes of someone who has died? This depends on how you view harm , and whether you think someone can be harmed after his or her death. One way of thinking about this question is to think about whether someone can be harmed even if that harm does not impinge on their experiences in any way. Think of Truman in the movie The Truman Show , and imagine that the producers of the show were just a little more skillfulat keeping the deception going, so that it really was completely seamless. Truman never knows that he is being deceived, and from his point of view, his life is just find and dandy. So is he harmed by the deception? If, like me, you have the intuition that he is -- even though he doesn't know about the deception at all and even though the deception has no negative impact (in fact, it has quite a positive impact) on his experience -- you have some inclination to accept that harms can exist outside of...